Like many survey courses on American Literature, this class will examine how literature has contributed to the construction of national identity and what Benedict Anderson has called the 'imagined political community' of nationalism. In this particular class, we will specifically focus on representations of death, violence, and mourning as persistent motifs for 'remembering/forgetting' (i.e. producing) an American 'people.' To that end, we will pursue two questions across the course texts: how does the way in which death, violence, and mourning get represented produce a particular form of a national people? Who or what gets ‘forgotten’ in each form of remembrance?

The reading load for this class will be heavy and MAY include F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Alice Walker's Meridian, Fae Ng's Bone. Shorter class readings (available online) MAY include texts from Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Jackson Turner, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Work for the course includes participation in class discussion and activities; group presentations; weekly short, informal entries in a class go-post, a 5-7 page essay, and a final exam.